How many pages does Google search? I’m guessing 9,620,000,000

How many pages does Google search? I’m guessing 9,620,000,000: Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org points to this NYT story by John Markoff who reports that Google has removed from its front page the number of pages it searches.

Quote:

“…the company is challenging users to guess the number of pages the service searches after phasing in a larger index and has removed the latest number ‘8,168,684,336’ from the home page.

Okay. I accept the challenge.

First, I’ll search for a random series of letters that don’t exist on any page. For example, “stacikramer*paidcontent” (except in my test search, I left out the asterik so that when Google indexes this page, my demo will still work).

Okay, now that I know those series of letters return no results – in other words, there are zero pages with that series of letters appearing on it, I will do a “negative search” on the series: “-stacikramer*paidcontent“

In theory, the number of pages that Google can find without that series of letters is equal to all of the pages it searches: 9,620,000,000 as of a few minutes ago.

Or, at least, that’s the theory. However, multiple searches reveal different totals ranging from 9,580,000,000 to 9, 620,000,000.

Yes. I think you may be on to something. I think a list of “Nuclear Reactors” is probably the thing most people use Google to discover. At least, if they’re terrorists.

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Launched in August, 2000, RexBlog.com is the personal blog of Rex Hammock, founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., a customer media and marketing services company founded in 1991 in Nashville. Rex is also founder/helper-in-chief of SmallBusiness.com.(...)